The Age of Peak Guilt

For liveblogged transcripts of this talk, see the MIT Center for Civic Media blog.

http://www.wikipedia.org/ wiki

Q&A

Culture

• What can we do to build awesomeness into organizations that don't have it baked in from the start?
• What about organizations working on very serious issues? Can you work playfulness into that?

You can use competition to convince organizations - issue a challenge to them to do specific Awesome things (like opening up data to developers). And all organizations should have a sense of playfulness baked in, no matter how serious their cause. There is a tension between serious and playful though. Nonprofits push back against getting donations from people who don't care; they really want people to engage with their cause and be actively choosing to contribute.

Narratives and storytelling

There is a notion that narrative helps people relate to a cause - the idea of connecting hunger and *The Hunger Games* or creating a supervillain to personify global warming. Building stories gives people a meaningful connection to a cause.